Taking back control of your data
Dropbox charges €12/month for 2 TB and reads your metadata. Google Drive scans your documents to train its models. Self-hosted Nextcloud reverses the equation: your files, your rules, your server. For a GDPR-bound company, it's also the simplest way to guarantee data stays in the EU — our Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam sites are all in the eurozone.
A well-configured Nextcloud isn't CPU-hungry but demands fast storage: every thumbnail preview, every full-text search hits the disk. NVMe Gen4 (1M IOPS) is the difference between a photo gallery that renders instantly and one that crawls. We recommend the Titan: 16 GB of RAM leaves 8 GB for the Redis cache and MariaDB buffer pool.
The reference stack
docker run -d --name nextcloud-db mariadb:11 \
-e MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD=secret -v db:/var/lib/mysql
docker run -d --name nextcloud-redis redis:7
docker run -d --name nextcloud -p 8080:80 \
--link nextcloud-db:db --link nextcloud-redis:redis \
-v /srv/nextcloud:/var/www/html nextcloud:29In production, prefer docker-compose with Caddy or Traefik as an HTTPS reverse proxy. Enable memory caching in config.php:
'memcache.local' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\APCu',
'memcache.distributed' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\Redis',The three classic pitfalls
1. Under-sized PHP-FPM: 8 workers minimum, otherwise the web UI freezes during a large folder sync. 2. AJAX cron: switch Nextcloud's cron to system mode (*/5 * * * * php -f /var/www/html/cron.php), otherwise background jobs only run when someone visits the page. 3. Default previews: generate thumbnails in the background with the Preview Generator app, not on the fly.
GDPR and location
Hosting your Nextcloud with an American hyperscaler, even in an "eu-west" region, exposes you to the CLOUD Act. With us: European company, European datacenters, no transatlantic transfer. Write your DPA, point your DNS, and your processing register gets very short.
Scaling up
A Titan serves 30-50 active users (office sync, link sharing). Beyond that, move to a Quantum and externalize MariaDB to a second VPS: web/database separation is the first rung of Nextcloud high availability.